Technology trends are being followed by popular social media platforms. The same is the case with Instagram.
Recently, Instagram has made innovative changes in the Instagram reel to beat TikTok.
Instagram users’ ability to search is getting an upgrade. Today, the company announced that English-speaking users in six countries, including the UK, US, Ireland, and Canada, will be able to search the platform using keywords.
Before this announcement, Instagram users were only able to go for the hashtags or account names.
So, for example, if you previously wanted to find “healthy recipes,” you’d only be able to search for posts that tagged #healthydishes or accounts with variations on “healthy dishes” in their name or bio. Now, however, Instagram will let people search the keywords themselves, meaning posts that feature healthy recipes should surface, even if the specific tag is missing.
It’s unclear how the service determines what a post is about, though. My search for healthy recipes yielded gluten-free and paleo cookie recipes, for example, which likely isn’t what someone is trying to find when they search for healthy recipes.
A company representative says the team considers “a number of factors,” including the “type of content, captions when it was posted,” and more to surface relevant results. It also uses machine learning to “find the highest quality content that’s relevant to you.” For now we are only moving towards the grid posts.
This is majorly a big change user will be going to face. Instagram has always been frustratingly limited in giving people the ability to find the posts they really want.
Instagram says only certain terms will be searchable, though. “The search is limited to general interest topics and keywords that are within Instagram’s community guidelines,” the spokesperson says.
The game of keyword searching is on and on fire. It is expected that besides hashtags and other search queries, keyword searching will be great thing to use.
Are you excited to use this feature as we are? Tell us your thoughts.
For more technical updates, read our blog.
